Desertscape.

It's a wave-no, it's something else- a bubble is bursting somewhere, a song is dying, there's a clandestine parallel pathway that's operating in the very same godless microcosm we call life. I watch you build it up to a perfect falsetto and then, it's sudden, your voice dies mid-perfection. I will never encounter another one like that, never fulfill my lust for the flawless. It was an almost, but it was a not-quite too, and wavering back and forth between the two I see the impossibility of forever.
What is sacred, what has ever been to you, I ask you now as we sit in this cosy cafe waiting for our orders and the pianist's fingers linger over the keys of his bread and butter- like a ballerina, they go back and forth, back and forth, as I wait for an answer that you can give me. But it's lost to you as well, I can tell when I see you, when your voice is a croak that never became you. It always revealed your lies to me.

I would get up, walk away and leave, run into the streets of Amsterdam, Paris, Rome- wherever we sit in my imagination- only to find myself in the Sahara. Because what are you, if not a mirage? Illusory, delusional, a falsification, breathing here to crumble my sand castle. There will be nothing left when the water washes away our lives and our loves, the sea comes back to purge every now and then. This desert was once a sea, an ocean,a habitat. No more now, no more. From dust, to dust- This is us, unhinged and unraveled, as we wait for the champagne and the oysters, over-romanticizing the loss of romance, because an opportunity for glamour is not to be missed.

But inside, here, in my mind, I am parched. I am waiting, and there is an oasis that never was, will never be, calling out.